Thousands trapped on Pine Ridge burn clothes for warmth in wake of storm

HOW FUCKING DARE YOU!

What a sad and horrible mischaracterization of what I said and what I think IN EVERY POSSIBLE WAY.

First of all, grow up and learn to have a conversation with someone in order to understand what they might be saying.

Here's a concept: Ask questions.

Second, I was VERY CLEAR in my comment in that the idea is:

HELP PEOPLE TO THE EXTENT NECESSARY TO HAVE THEM GET ON THEIR FEET (whatever that means in terms of scale and time).

And then:

WHEN IT MAKES SENSE...

THEY NEED TO SLOWLY GET BACK TO A REALITY WHERE THEY CAN HAVE THE KIND OF SELF-SUFFICIENCY AND SELF-RELIANCE THAT MAKES PEOPLE WHOLE, PROUD AND GIVES THEM THE ABILITY TO GROW AND SUCCEED.

How fucking dare you!

That's what you get here on HN. Robots who can't have a conversation, mischaracterize, put things out of context and think nothing of insulting the shit out of people. Nobody ever bothers to have a conversation and try to understand.

Oh, yes, the comment also contained a question. Read the very last sentence.

Name ONE, JUST ONE, fucking society that has excelled, thrived and grown in parity to others in an environment of total dependency to government handouts. You cannot. That does not exist, in any society across cultures and history. That, in fact, anywhere you care to look, is a formula for nothing less than various forms of soft and hard enslavement.

Yes, of course, American Indians suffered greatly. Nobody is denying that. The conversation here --or the question I asked-- was if the current status quo is something that will ever allow that population to move out of their current station in life. As far as I know, the only bright light they have to look at, as far as I know, are casinos, which, in my opinion, is a horrific thing.

> taking away the assistance without also changing the fundamentals of the game might not help.

Exactly right. I didn't suggest it has to be taken out cold-turkey. That would be incredibly cruel.

At this point it is probably a 25 to 50 year process. We have to figure out how to effectively get people out of these horrid places and circumstances.

The assistance, then, has to be designed to achieve precisely that and nothing less. The proof is in the results. The fact that we have millions of people living under these circumstances is evidence enough that we are not helping.

There are layers to this. As is always the case, education is likely a massive element of the problem.

I can't suggest an entire solution, that would take a group of well-qualified people time and study to lay out a plan to bring populations under the grips of well-intentioned-yet-harmful government assistance out of the darkness they live.

Everyone should have equivalent opportunities. When we claim to help, yet harm, we condemn entire segments of society to never have access to the opportunities everyone else might enjoy. This is cruel.

Say stuff like this on HN and you get nothing less than merciless downvoting, mischaracterizations and personal attacks. Makes you wonder who these people are. Who actually thinks we are doing a good job with these segments of our society?

It's Einstein's definition of insanity: Continue to do the same thing and expect different results.

In the USSR, peasants were essentially serfs. They only got internal passports in the 1960s and 1970s, and without those they could not leave the village without permission. They worked for a state collective farm, most of their pay came in just counting the "labour-days" they contributed - a totally self-containbed, essentially prison-like economic system.

So yes, I agree, I originally brought up serfs as being something from 150 years ago, but it was more like 50-60 years ago.